Sex, secrets and absent fathers: John Irving’s 15th novel

An awful lot happens to Adam Brewster, the protagonist of John Irving’s new novel, “The Last Chairlift.” Indeed, it would hardly be an Irving novel if it weren’t stuffed — sometimes overstuffed, like one of those sofas with the springs coming out at odd angles.

But the main event is probably when Adam’s athletic, unmarried mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster, straddles him, age 13, in bed, presses his shoulders down to the mattress and gives him the kind of “lawless” kiss she’s just planted on a prospective new boyfriend.

In a page or two, Adam — named for the Bible’s first man, narrating in the first person — rapid- shuffles through all the conflicted feelings of an incest victim: curiosity, fright, confusion, indignation, loyalty.

T hen t he thrilling and anxious descent into secrecy. “When you keep secrets f rom people you love, you don’t sleep as soundly as a child,” says Adam, a novelist, screenwriter and close contemporary of Irving, who himself has told of being sexually abused by a woman when he was 11. “That’s when you know the growing up has happened, though you still have more growing up ahead of you — I certainly did.”

This is one of the more tender moments in a tough old- fashioned bildungsroman that meanders more than it moves, with its creator’s customary herks, jerks, digressions and Rabelaisian excesses. Readers who hang on for its 900 pages will keep Adam and his extended family close, sometimes claustrophobic company over nearly eight decades, from the familiar Irving haunt of Exeter, N. H., in midcentury; to Reagan- era New York City and the Catholic Church’s callousness about the AIDS crisis; to Donald Trump’s election and Toronto ( where Irving has lived since 2014).

“The Last Chairlift,” Irving’s 15th novel ( and, he has avowed, his last long one), was at first titled “Darkness as a Bride,” from Claudio’s line in “Measure for Measure” about embracing death, now the epigraph. Darkness is also a prerequisite for the movies, and unmade ones haunt Adam Brewster; sections of the book are delivered in script form. The dramatis personae include a gaggle of ghosts, who begin to appear to our hero soon after “the kiss of questionable judgment.”

One of them may be Adam’s absent father — absent fathers being another Irving staple — about whom his mother, a ski instructor who refers to Adam as “my one and only,” has been mysteriously coy. The novel’s new title suggests a final chance at ascending the heavens, or something more ominous: one more bumpy run before the whole operation shuts down.

Irvingworld conjures nostalgia for when novel- writing felt more muscular — sportlike, even, when novelists were celebrities duking it out on talk shows. But this sustained sojourn can feel like an unrelenting avalanche of words from which one emerges blinking and dazed — a book to be not so much read as survived.

Preachy and tauntingly bawdy in patches, “The Last Chairlift” does have pleasurable stretches, when the air is clear and the terrain smooth. But unless you’re an Irving superfan craving a big summingup, the novel’s muchness might simply suffocate.